October 19th - Vacation guide to the Solar System

Have you planned your next vacation yet? For those of you interested in winter sports, the onset of November means you can finally start hitting the slopes at the variety of ski resorts within the US! But, why not kick things up a notch? Want to get bigger air so you can practice back-to-back frontside 1080s and rival the likes of Chloe Kim? Then head on out to Pluto!

If you're not a big fan of snow, fear not! Jana Grcevich, our speaker on Friday, stepped us through the top 10 vacation spots within the Solar System. From taking in the breathtaking views of Saturn's haxagonal cloud pattern around its north pole to taking a leisurely blimp ride through the upper atmosphere of Venus; there is bound to be something everyone would enjoy! As Jana explained, we are at the dawn of a space tourism revolution, and although there are plenty of hurdles to overcome (such as how to protect ourselves from the lethal radiation doses we would be exposed to on such trips), it's fun to daydream about touring the Solar System one day.

"But I want to go right now!" Yeah, I hear ya! Fortunately Jana gave a couple of options we could all pursue starting now! The Intergalactic Travel Bureau, a group that Jana is a part of, has put out a virtual reality app that allows smartphone users to embark on "space vacations". So go get yourself a cardboard VR viewer, download the app, and start exploring! Alternatively, Jana briefly talked about a book she and Olivia Koski co-authored: "Vacation Guide to the Solar System", a fun book for readers of all ages.

After the talk, Jana answered many fun questions from the audience and had awesome Solar System post cards to pass out. The audience then headed up to the roof for some star gazing but were instead greeted with mostly cloudy skies. Nevertheless, views from atop the roof are always a nice treat!



-- Jorge Cortes (graduate student)

March 1: Martian Summer

We hosted author, Andrew Kessler, and approximately 80 members of the general public on Friday, March 1st to hear all about the people and the science behind NASA's Phoenix Mars mission. Kessler spent a year with the engineers and scientists who worked on Phoenix to learn what it takes to launch a spacecraft from Earth and safely place it on the surface of another planet. Phoenix landed near the north pole on Mars, the first craft to ever land in the polar regions of the red planet. It's mission was to study the history of water in the ice-rich boundary of the Martian arctic. To do this, the Phoenix lander was equipped with a robot arm that could scoop up soil samples for analysis by an array of instruments including a mass spectrometer, a wet chemistry lab, and a high resolution imager. Not only did Phoenix discover subsurface water ice, but it also found that Martian soil contained high concentrations of chloride which converts to perchlorate in the presence of sunlight. You can read all about the Phoenix mission and Kessler's experience in mission control in his book, "Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days with the Phoenix Mars Mission" and you can follow him on Twitter here.

After the talk, audience members toured our rooftop observatory (with the help of graduate students Jennifer Weston and Yong Zheng and undergraduate Jose Montelongo), viewed 3D movies (with undergraduate Bryan Terrazas), and listened to graduate student Steph Douglas explain the myriad of motions experienced by the Earth from our rotation around the Sun all the way out to the expansion of the Universe.

Join us for our next event on Friday, March 15th when post-doc Ashely Pagnotta explains how supernovae are used to understand the mysterious force known as dark energy.

--Summer Ash (Director of Outreach)